Gadfly

"Stick it, Jerry" is there, and "Bill stickers will be prosecuted", though everyone now knows that Bill Stickers was not only cleared on appeal to the European Court of Human Rights but the hoarding company ordered to pay him £5m compensation for recurring mild tendonitis.

We mention it because of last week's news that 90 jobs are to go at that great egregious edifice which is the government tower block in Bishop Auckland.

Couldn't they relocate the rest of the workers while they're about it, before carefully placing several tons of gelignite beneath that high rise hideosity and bringing the civil service down a dozen pegs?

If anything in the North-East truly sticks out like a sore thumb, it's Whitehall's whitlow in Bishop Auckland.

IT was also from Bishop Auckland that we first heard claim to the phrase about looking black over Bill's mother's, now an almost universal forecast of rain.

Bill Proud, solicitor and sportsman, lived in a large family house behind the town's cricket and football grounds. Seeking prospects of play, it's said, players would gather on the pavilion balcony and observe that it was looking black over Bill's mother's.

That similar meteorological prowess was claimed for Bill Bramley and his mum at Shildon BR seemed neither here nor there.

In A Word in Your Shell-Like (Collins, £16 99) Nigel Rees traces the phrase back to at least the early 20th century and to half the counties in England.

The outlook is still uncertain, however. "Since 1993," says Rees, "I have received a goodly number of claims from correspondents who were not only personally acquainted with Bill, but with his mother as well."

ANOTHER surprise, "the dog's bollocks" also fails to make Rees's top 6,000, though "dog's dinner" (and breakfast) are carefully chewed over.

Tail wagging readers have in recent weeks been much exercised by this phrase, though Tim Stahl in Darlington is inclined to deconstruct the "Meccano" theory - that "dog's bollocks" is a corruption of "box de luxe."

Under the improbable heading "Canine testes", Mr Stahl - a recently retired orthopaedic surgeon - supposes it simply to mean outstanding, whether good or bad.

"It makes more sense than Meccano. Orthopaedic surgeons were trained on Meccano; we have to defend their good name."

THE football league of which the column is chairman is trying (yet again) to curb what the laws of the game call "offensive, abusive and insulting" language and what most others call effing and blinding.

As Saturday's experience suggested, we aren't always successful.

Part of the problem appears to be that referees and their assistants lack what has come to be known as "bottle", now taken to mean courage and perhaps best remembered in the Milk Marketing Board's 1982 television commercials.

Milk has gotta lotta bottle...

Though the Oxford Dictionary of Catchphrases misses it entirely, the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that it probably derives from the old phrase "no bottle" - meaning "no good" - though rhyming slang may also be responsible.

The way that they pronounce things down south, "bottle and glass" = backside (well, you know) = "your bottle's fallen out."

Rees reckons that the catalyst was probably Arthur Daly in Minder. Well, would you Adam and Eve it?

THESE Cockneys have more bottle than Lowcock's lemonade factory, of course. Among many others, the Oxford Dictionary of Rhyming Slang records "bottle and stopper" (copper), "bottle of beers" (ears), "bottle of porter" (daughter), "bottle of sauce" (horse) and "bottle of scotch" (watch). London has a lotta bottle.

COLLINS, among the biggest names in lexicography, have also sent details of the new desktop edition of their English Dictionary.

"New entries reveal a nation obsessed with sex, status and celebrity and highlight the growth of a disturbing underclass of the maladjusted, the irresponsible and the downright criminal," it says.

Thus the dictionary has gained metrosexual ("a heterosexual man who spends a lot of time and money on his appearance and likes to shop"), hasbian ("a former lesbian who has become heterosexual or bisexual") and hornbag ("a good looking, promiscuous woman.")

Nigel Mansell and Fatima Whitbread are out - too 1980s - Jonny Wilkinson and Wayne Rooney in, alongside Camilla Parker Bowles. Prince Andrew and Princess Anne have also vanished.

A desktop dictionary isn't just something else to sit next to the paperclips, of course, but alert readers will have defined that already.

WORDS may also have failed Chinese customs authorities last week when a Darlington lad - who has a Chinese wife - returned from holiday over here.

However greener the other man's grass might appear, it was also getting very long and the one thing he couldn't buy in China was a lawn mower.

That's why his dad insisted on a trip to B&Q, bought a small Qualcast, unwrapped it and stowed it in his luggage.

The tale's passed on by family friend Lou Dale in Leeming Bar, near Northallerton. "When everything these days seems to be made in China," says Lou, "it's good to know that just for once we're doing things the other way around."

OUR attention is drawn both to a degree course advertisement for Cleveland College of Art and Design - "If you've just completed you're A-levels" - and to a note from Cockfield area historian Mike Heaviside notifying a change of e-mail address.

At the foot of Mike's e-mail is an automatic message indicating that it has been checked "for virus's" by McAfee Antivirus Software - but not, as with the clever folk at Cleveland College or Art and Design, against the dreaded aberrant apostrophe.

...and finally, someone has kindly sent the 2004-05 programme for Richmond Methodist Guild, in which the promised entertainment for June 16 is simply headed "Vicar and tarts". It's possible, of course, that this is simply a talk by the column's old friend Canon Richard Cooper, pictured, followed by a little farinaceous light refreshment - but if anyone knows differently, they should get in touch at once.

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